This is the third post in a series on "The Mobile Citizen," a look at how the Civic Platform is helping agencies of all sizes engage their mobile citizens and stay ahead of the "mobile mind shift." ------ Wednesdays in the New York City office means a rotating assortment of cuisines for team lunch (follow @dshaeffbk for the occasional #foodtweet). Typically we gather to talk about work, upcoming weekend plans, sports, movies, anything really. Every now and then new faces will spice things up. Earlier this month, Mark Headd and Seth Axthelm from our technical evangelist team were visiting. They work to enable, support, educate and innovate with Accela partners and customers to expand the Civic Platform. The lunch gave Mark and Amir Reavis-Bey, a co-founder of Civic Insight, the chance to catch up between bites of lasagna. As I eavesdropped on their conversation I realized that Mark and Amir's...

One of the favorite things about my job is that I’m focused on how to make our customers’ lives easier. So I’m particularly excited to share the news of Accela’s partnership with APPCityLife, the grand prize winner of our Civic App Challenge earlier this year. Why am I so excited? While it’s great to hear stories about government agencies using mobile apps to increase efficiencies and connect directly to their citizens, it’s still a daunting prospect. Creating a mobile app often requires a) someone who majored in Computer Science and has mastered multiple, complex programming languages and b) a great deal of time and money to get an app up and running. Not anymore. Government agencies across North America (and Accela customers, of course) can now create and manage their own mobile apps in record time — in days versus weeks or months — without having to write a single...

Accela Connect is a four-day event in early March that will bring together developers, business partners, customers and Accela staff to discuss ways that we can strengthen the civic technology ecosystem and create new links between governments and those that they serve.

You can read more about this event in a previous post on the Accela blog by Ken Sawtelle, Director of the Accela Center of Excellence. As part of the event, we’re holding an open data hackathon.

Seven years ago, Apple launched the iPhone with a few simple but powerful apps that showcased the capability and potential of this innovative device, and a year later the “App Store” was launched, empowering developers to build apps for the iPhone. This capability turned it into one of the most powerful platforms in the world by giving developers the tools to construct their own apps and a marketplace in which to sell them. The iPhone is no longer just a phone; it is a fitness tracker, entertainment system, home automation remote, newspaper, productivity device, cash register and more—all because of the rich ecosystem built in part by developers. In many ways, Apple’s iOS platform and the Accela Civic Platform are very similar in that they both empower developers to build and create on top of the core platform. While platforms and app development have become commonplace in other industries, there...